John Lescroart - Nothing But The Truth

This is where it had gone wrong, what had led them to here, but he wasn’t going to air all that now. He lifted his glass and killed another inch of Guinness. ‘I don’t know, Mose. I don’t know.’

McGuire leaned over the bar. Whispered. ‘Tell me she isn’t sleeping with him.’

‘She says no.’ Hardy made eye contact. ‘She wouldn’t do that.’

‘She wouldn’t,’ he agreed quickly, but the relief showed. Her brother, at least, believed it. ‘She’d tell you first, before anything happened, even if she was only thinking about it. That’s who she is.’

‘OK.’ Talking about it wasn’t going to make it better or worse. It was just going to invite other people to participate in the discussion, and Hardy wasn’t doing that, even with Moses. He and Frannie might have their serious differences, but they were as one in a way that made them aliens in the modern world – they believed that their private lives were private.

‘But your house…?’ Moses asked. ‘This morning you were saying it was part of this, too.’

‘Part of who killed Bree, Mose. Not part of me and Frannie.’

‘And you’re close to finding that? Who did that?’

‘If I am I don’t know it, but somebody must think so. I’ve got to believe hitting my house was a warning to back off.’

Moses sipped his Scotch, then put it down carefully. ‘Unless whoever it was thought you were home, in which case it wasn’t just a warning.’

Hardy considered for a beat. ‘No. I doubt that. I’m not that much of a threat.’ He shook his head, the idea rattling around. ‘I don’t think so,’ he repeated, more to himself than to Moses.

‘Well you don’t have to think it for it to be true. If I were you, I’d put it in the mix.’

‘What, exactly?’

‘That somebody’s trying to kill you.’

On that cheery note, the front door banged open and a mixed six-pack of humanity flowed in, talking football, calling for beer. Moses shrugged at Hardy, gave them a welcome, and headed down the rail for the taps.

It was a signal for Hardy that he didn’t want to waste any more time philosophizing with his brother-in-law. Moses was right – there was far too much he didn’t know. He was vulnerable and couldn’t allow himself the luxury of letting his guard down.

So with neither plan nor destination, Hardy left two-thirds of his Guinness. He’d parked around the corner on 10th Avenue and pushed himself through the fog, hunched against the wind. Getting in behind the wheel, he hesitated before turning the key, then broke a thin smile as the engine turned over. See? No bomb. Flicking the heater up to high, he pulled out, got to the corner, and turned right. He had no idea where he was going.

All he knew was that the Little Shamrock wasn’t anywhere he needed to be just now. He needed to work. Time was running out. He couldn’t go back to his house – the fire department owned it. There were still his children, and Frannie. But he’d already seen them today. That would have to be enough.

Where the hell was Ron Beaumont? Or Phil Canetta?

What did he have? What could he work with?

The only thing that came remotely to mind was his paperwork, the lawyer’s constant companion and last refuge. At his office he had his copies of pages from Carl Griffin’s file, the notes he’d taken last night with Canetta, the propaganda he’d liberated from Bree’s office, and the letters from her high school yearbook. At some point, he reasoned, some part of all of that might intersect.

David Freeman believed that lawyers should work around the clock. He had had full bathrooms installed on each of the three floors of his building so that his associates would not be able to use the lame excuse after an all-nighter that they had to go home to freshen up and get ready for court.

In twenty-five minutes, Hardy was in his office – showered, shaved, and changed into the shirt that he’d stashed in his file cabinet a couple of months before.

When he got seated at his desk, he retrieved the four messages he’d received since last night, hoping against hope that one of them would turn out to be from Canetta, or even Ron Beaumont. If Al Valens had left a message Hardy hadn’t been able to get back at his home, then maybe either or both of the men he wanted to talk to had tried as well, or called here at his office afterwards.

But no such luck.

Three of the calls were from clients in various stages of feeling abandoned and the last was Jeff Elliot. When Hardy called him back, he was himself on fire over the blaze at Hardy’s house, although he did pay a fleeting moment’s lip service to sympathy for Hardy’s loss. ‘Is there anything I can do to help you, Diz? You got a place to stay?’

‘Yeah, we’re covered, Jeff. Thanks, though.’

But back to the scoop. ‘And you think it was arson?’

‘I’d bet a lot on it. In fact, I wouldn’t rule out that it’s the MTBE people, the Valdez Avengers, all those jerks.’

‘If that’s true,’ Jeff said, his enthusiasm overflowing, ‘it’s a giant break in that story.’

‘That’s my goal,’ Hardy said drily. ‘Sacrifice my home for a good story. Maybe you’ll win the Pulitzer and I’ll be happy for you. We can have a party in my new house.’

Elliot apologized. ‘I didn’t mean it like that, Diz.’ He paused. ‘But don’t you want to get whoever did this, take ’em down?‘

‘You don’t know.’

‘I bet I do. All I’m saying is here, maybe we’ve got a real connection.’

‘Between who?’

‘That’s what I think I have, Diz. Do you want to hear it?’

‘Talk,’ Hardy said.

‘OK. After you left yesterday, I went with what you said – the guy from Caloco-’

‘Jim Pierce.’

‘Yeah, all right, Pierce. He’d told you that SKO funded these cretins, right?’

‘Right.’

‘Well, what if that were true? Where was the connection? So I started poking through among all the crap I showed you yesterday – that thick file of paper – and realized that a lot of the pro-ethanol stuff comes from this organization named the Fuels Management Consortium, FMC for short. It’s here in town. Familiar?’

‘No, but this stuff wasn’t my major until a couple of days ago. I thought FMC made tanks and stuff, big equipment.’

‘Same letters, different company.’

‘OK. Go on.’

‘Well, FMC produces pro-ethanol, anti-MTBE press releases. Tons of them. Sometimes the source of them is a little hard, like impossible, to recognize because they get picked up by intermediaries – syndicated as hard news stories in the dailies, also in industry publications, the Health Industry Newsletter, Environmental Health Monthly , like that. So I never put it together that it might be one source.’

‘And then you did?’

‘Right. Plus every time some more MTBE leaks into another well, we get the update before the ink’s dry on the EPA report.’

‘I’m listening.’

‘OK, so a few months ago, we – the Chronicle - we decided to do a big spread on the dangers of MTBE. I mean, this was a four-day, front-page feature. Lots of scary stuff – cancer clusters, birth defects, the usual. Even a lay person such as yourself might remember it.’

‘Vaguely.’

‘Well, Kerry had just taken the primary and suddenly this was news, and we ran it. Anyway, the reporter who wrote the article, as it happens, is a friend of mine named Sherry Weir. She shows up in the office last night on this water temple poisoning as I’m thinking about our discussion, yours and mine. She tells me that FMC was the prime source for her feature – it’s an impressive propaganda factory.

‘So yesterday, when Sherry hears about the Pulgas Temple, her first stop on the way to the office is the FMC offices in the Embarcadero Buildings. OK, she knows it’s Saturday afternoon, they’re probably closed up, but it’s a shot. And what does she find?’